Gun-play
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The gun-play is a big part of the game Selfish and as it is impotent the have been a lot of work and ideas around how to do it in a right way. I have worked and are still polishing this mechanic but how did this process start then?
First I was thinking and working on what and how the PC (player character) would fire “bullets” to begin with. The first idea I had was having the PC shot bubbles as this would also help with conveying the feeling of being underwater even more. This however was quickly scraped as the concept for the game talk about “FISH WITH GUNS”. The group liked the idea of having the PC firing bubbles as the main bullet. Trying to work that in I had different ideas but landed on just giving the PC a bubble gun instead of having a “real” gun firing bubbles as this looked better and more “realistic”.’
The bubbles themselves was at the beginning just moving forewords in a straight line, but as we continued to work we feel that it would make more sense if the bubbles would float to the top in an arc after being fired. This again to give a more “realistic” feel. Bubbles also worked in a different plain that being fish do not breath air, so firing air bubbles also made sense in that perspective.
When it came to the power-up we talked about for our game the feeling became that a more powerful gun in some way was the way to go here. As a designer, I tried to think about what makes sense in a thematic way. After some back and forth in the group we landed on a cannon. Something resembling an old able it exaggerated pirate cannon I tried to work on how a cannon would work and not completely clash with the rest of the game. We had ideas about of what to use as ammo for it as well. Things like harpoons and just normal cannonballs. In the end, it became “pebbles” from the aquarium itself.
When it came to how the power-up should work we were first talking about having it being “you get hit and loose it” but as we moved away from a health system this was scraped. The we were working on it being time-based. This idea was good in theory but did was not all that fun. Instead we tried an ammo system. This quickly became more fun as if you were good enough you could pick up multiple power-ups and get more ammo and feel even more powerful.  |
